ABSTRACT
Military culture is a useful prism for studying the supposedly unified nature of the nation and “its” military.1 This idea was not new in the interwar era. Since the nineteenth century the nation-states and their bureaucracies have contributed to the development of national armies in a way that emphasized the importance of this identification with the nation. At the core of the notion of a military unified with the nation was the rise of the modern conscript armies. The vast machinery of the state tracked local registries, followed school and training records, and processed the annual age cohort of the males available for conscription. Especially for Germany, the growth of the conscript-based national army in the post-1871 era had been one of the main institutional successes in the state-building process.2
